Monday, February 29, 2016

Hoping to avoid a repeat of the messy fight for the Republican nomination in 2012, the party drew up a calendar and delegate-selection rules intended to allow a front-runner to wrap things up quickly.

Now, with Republicans voting in 11 states on Tuesday, the worst fears of the party’s establishment are coming true: Donald J. Trump
could all but seal his path to the nomination in a case of unintended
consequences for the party leadership, which vehemently opposes him.

As the calendar flips to March, a whirlwind of states vote on the same
days and in quick succession. By the middle of the month, 58 percent of
the total delegates will have been awarded, and Mr. Trump could be
unstoppable in getting the 1,237 needed to clinch the nomination.

Awesome. Meanwhile, the predicted Senate meltdown over the president nominating a new justice to SCOTUS to replace Antonin Scalia has come to pass.

Senate Republicans on Tuesday united behind an official position on
how to deal with President Obama’s expected nominee to replace the late
Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia: no hearings, no votes and no new
justice until Obama is out of office.

“Presidents have a right to
nominate, just as the Senate has its constitutional right to provide or
withhold consent,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said
in a morning floor speech. “In this case, the Senate will withhold it.”

That
declaration was underscored after McConnell held a closed-door meeting
with Republicans sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee. All 11 GOP
panel members subsequently signed a letter pledging not to hold hearings
on any replacement for Scalia until a new president is inaugurated.

Which shows what a laughing stock the entire process has become. Bad enough these goofs work 133 days a year, but vowing in February to do no more work until November is astonishingly irresponsible and reprehensible. It also begs the question: why so afraid? Why act like such (fill in favorite Trump vulgarities here)?

It has certainly been the case that this entire political season has provoked a lot of "can it get any weirder than this?" moments, followed by even stranger and sillier developments. The campaign has devolved into name calling, insults, comparing the size of the candidates codpieces, and tanning booths.

Oh, and Reagan...35 years down the road, who is the natural heir to Reagan (imagine Carter running in 1980, about who was the natural heir to Roosevelt, with a straight face, like it wasn't eons ago in the country's political and generational history). It's beyond surreal.

I'm not sure it's a question of "polarization" as it is incompetence and stupidity on behalf of the elected and those who elect them. Coming out of Citizens United, I think the greater fear was that our politics would be bought and paid for by the power elite, and the vulgar hoi polloi wouldn't have a say in the matter.

Instead, there seems to be a direct correlation between the amount of money being spent and the quality of stupid being produced: thus, the more money the 1% throws into the process to buy results, the more idiotic and farcical the electoral process seems to get.

Happy Leap Day...can't wait to see where we are on the next one, four years hence.

UPDATE: Prescient piece from one of my favorite writers over at Esquire, Charles Pierce, on the destruction of the Republican party occurring today, Super Tuesday 3/1:

Trump played by the rules established by the largely vestigial
Republican establishment. He won in caucus states (Nevada), and he won
in primary states (South Carolina, New Hampshire). He stands poised to
win states on Tuesday night from Massachusetts to Alabama. There has
been no hint of scandal in any of his victories. It is delusional to
pretend that he is not the overwhelming choice of the people who are
voting Republican in the year of Our Lord 2016. And it is intellectually
dishonest to try to concoct strategies to deny the consensus choice of
your party a nomination fairly won just because the consensus choice of
your party is a vulgar talking yam. If your party happens to have
concocted a constituency with a sweet tooth for authoritarian
nonsense, then trying (again) to push that reckoning down the road is to
guarantee something even worse comes along next time.

Ironic that the destruction of this once storied party, a party called home by the likes of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Nixon (yes, him) and Reagan, is being delivered final rites by a guy wearing a Whig.

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